Fall

The first day of fall arrives with summer clinging to its coattails. It is warm in the woods, the air holding on to the strength of the sun, which has not yet lost its power. Not really. It hangs lower in the sky these days, but the sky is so gloriously blue and completely unblemished, there is nothing to detract from the sun’s heat.

I walk that old familiar path with the dogs, yet it is different, as it always is. Today the treetops, yellowing with the season, hints of orange amongst the gold, glow like stained glass in a cathedral. Mushrooms, startlingly orange, bloom from the rich, dark forest floor, green moss so vibrant it seems to be lit from within, forms a soft carpet over rotted logs and stumps and fills in the spaces between trees. I step carefully around these things, look for the glistening line of a spider’s web so I can duck underneath, direct the dogs around with their clomping and stomping oblivious movements, watch them kick the tops off mushrooms, appear before me with fine strands of webs strung across their faces, between Molly’s ears.

“What?” They seem to say with their eyes as I shake my head disparagingly, and we continue on, clambering over the same downed trees we have been clambering over all year. “But look how the light has changed things,” I want to say to the dogs, “look how the colours are different, how the woods glow this time of year, how perfect it is because there are no mosquitoes, no blackfly, no deerfly, no ticks.”

And I do say these things when I can no longer keep them in as a warm breeze moves through the trees and I stop to watch the treetops sway, listen to them sigh in these few days between seasons before the smell of burnt leaves is carried on the wind with a bite of winter on its heels.

The dogs look at me, bright eyed and full of anticipation, and for a moment I think they get it, of course they do, we are in tune with these woods, the three of us, but then I realize at my feet the ground is strewn with sticks.

Oh. Right.

Early morning visitor

We are woken abruptly by angry barking and lie there for a moment in the early hours of the morning, listening.

Outside the sky is just starting to lighten. Trees at the windows are scraggily black shapes only, no distinction between twig and leaf, against a pale gray twilit backdrop. There is just enough light in the bedroom to make out the beams of the ceiling and the clothes on the floor.

The barking does not stop. We sit up in bed because Murdoch’s forceful voice is insistent, constant, which means there is a reason for the noise. Molly’s staccato bark is there too, but she is a bit of an alarmist, we have learned, and barks at the slightest provocation, so we look to Murdoch for confirmation.

Many times Molly has leapt up from a snooze to bark at the window or the door or just into the room in general, alerting Murdoch to some unknown danger, and many times Murdoch has checked it out with a preliminary huff, ears alert, tail raised high, and then, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, has cast a look over his shoulder at Morgan or me as if to say, ‘She’s crazy’, and then returned to his bed with a grumble. If, on the other hand, he joins in with the alarm, then we know it is to be taken seriously.

So, just before 5:30 am, with Murdoch’s loud voice echoing up through the house and the cats scurrying hastily into our room, we crawl out of bed. Chestnut leaps up on to the wide windowsill, his shape silhouetted against the predawn and I know his curiosity has got the better of him, so I join him at the window to see if I can see anything.

“It’s a bear,” I say before I am even sure. We are three stories up in the trees, looking out over the edge of the second floor roof. In the space between the corner of our rickety old shed and the little pine tree growing valiantly straight, it’s boughs fanned out symmetrically, there is a shadow darker than the other shadows.

“Where?” Morgan says, appearing beside me.

“Just by the edge of the shed,” I say, turning my head sideways to try and get a sense of movement in my peripheral vision.

Downstairs, the dogs are still barking and I imagine them at the tall windows of the entryway, not 20 feet away from the bear, getting angrier at this belligerent creature just wandering around in their woods.

We watch the black shadow morph like an ink stain from one shape to another, more a suggestion of something large and black in the dim light than anything defined and obvious. In a moment the bear turns and lumbers fluidly across our small clearing and up into the woods, although we are confused by a low hanging branch also black in the gray light of predawn and for a moment we think the bear is lingering. But it has gone, and Murdoch’s bark is more pleading now, an entreaty to us to let him out to investigate.

We head downstairs then and Molly meets us in the kitchen. “Did you see a bear?” Morgan asks and she bounces happily and rubs her face on our legs. ‘Now that you’re up,’ she seems to say, ‘Let’s eat and then go play!’

“Good doggies,” I say as I head to the entryway where Murdoch is still standing at the window, vibrating with excitement, eyes glued to the woods. “Good boy Murds,” I say and touch his head. He huffs and shuffles backwards, then forwards, and I add, “No, you are not going out there.”

It is not long before everyone has settled down again and we head back upstairs to bed, although I am sure as the sky lightens quickly I will not really be sleeping.

A couple of hours later, with sunlight streaming through the trees, we get up for real. I wonder where the bear has gone as the Robins, who are nesting in an old Pileated Woodpecker hole in a tree by our house, fly by with worms in their beaks.

Downstairs, Molly greets us again as though she did not just see us two hours earlier, and Murdoch emerges from his kennel stretching eagerly. He is still itching to get outside, but I make him wait for a minute or two because now there is a rabbit in the clearing where the bear had been. His tall ears catch bits of sunlight that filter sideways through the trees while he munches on the green leaves of all kinds of forest plants growing there, and I think I do not want to disturb him because he looks so content.

Lost on the mountain

I spent the afternoon picking ticks off the dogs with the sun streaming down on us between the trees. It fell weighty on my shoulders and filled the clearing around our house as I first leaned over one dog, then the other, their black fur smelling like swamp and sunshine. I knelt on the deck, my knees crunching on bits of stick spewed about by Molly, and ran my hands up and down their legs, then sat side-by-side with them, letting my fingers disappear into their fur almost idly, knowing sooner or later they would happen upon that tell-tale bump on otherwise flat spans of skin. Even as I found one tick after another, I knew I was missing so many.

We spent that morning getting lost on the mountain trails down the road from our house. Not our usual walking trail, a different one we have left unexplored for so long, mostly because it requires traversing a stretch of the main road that runs perpendicular to our little dead-end road. It is still a country road made of dirt and gravel with wildflowers spilling out onto the edges from the ditches on either side, but it is a thoroughfare and it is not uncommon to see a car or two.

Cars make Murdoch’s brain shut off to the point he thinks he is invincible, a giant even, that could very likely catch and eat the metallic beasts as they rumble past. I become nothing more than a nuisance fly buzzing about behind him, a superfluous accessory to get snagged on things and slow him down as he lunges after his prey. So, Murdoch and I came to an agreement years ago that we would not venture on to that road together lest we kill each other.

But there was this trail, we heard, one that would take us up to the top of the mountain where we could look out over the valley. Our usual trails have become so familiar, an adventure seemed like a good idea once we discovered we could get to an access point of the trail by walking through our woods and emerging onto the road for just a short stretch before being able to duck behind a line of trees into a meadow on the other side.

So this morning beneath an overcast sky we headed into our woods, taking a left instead of a right to crash

through the line of trees that contains our world, and crossed the road without incident. Once in the meadow of wildflowers, a sea of yellow and purple and green, I unhooked the leashes to let the dogs dash through it all and watched the grasses swallow them up. I knew there would be ticks. Even as their numbers seemed to be diminishing along our usual trails, here we were immersed in grass up past my knees, a completely different environment from the broad-leaf carpeting in our own woods. But I put the tiny creatures out of my mind and followed the dogs into the scrub and new-growth forest and away from the road as the trail started up the mountain.

We climbed and climbed, following the curving trail of waving grasses meandering through the patches of scrub forest, accompanied by the high-pitched whine of mosquitoes and the pattering of blackflies against my face. I put up the hood of my shirt over my sunhat to keep the bugs from attacking my neck and watched deerfly land on the dogs’ heads.

There were more trails on the mountain than I had anticipated; kept open it seemed by four-wheelers and probably snowmobiles in the winter. At each fork we stayed to the right as I tried to imagine our position on the mountain and keep us walking towards the top. When we were quite high up and the trees changed from new growth to mature woods, we headed in beneath the canopy, our feet slurping along the muddy trail, everything cast in green.

Looking up through the trees I could see the cliff face at the top of the mountain staring back at me and I thought we must be close, but when the trail began to track downhill again the whole adventure started to feel a bit like a wild goose chase. We had been walking for quite some time and we would have to do that same distance in return. Anyway, I was getting hungry and it felt like we would be searching for the top of that mountain for the rest of the day. So we turned around and began to retrace our steps home.

Then, on the way down, we missed a turn and got lost. I had a sense the trail didn’t seem familiar but I reasoned, how would I really know one patch of trees from another. But the puddles were different; it hadn’t been quite so wet on the way up. I couldn’t find my footprints from earlier, or the dogs’. And what about that tree I had to duck under, surely I should have passed that by now. And where was that pile of old weathered logs I’d found behind a row of newish trees, the light shining down from a tiny clearing above as though the logs stood in a spotlight on stage, the trees kind of containing them, defining them. It was like catching a glimpse through the curtain just moments before the show was to begin. I would have remembered seeing that again.

When the trail straightened out on its downward grade, I could see the distant view between the columns of trees and I knew we were heading down the hill in the wrong direction. We were facing north towards the valley, not west towards the mountain that rose up behind our woods.

I stood on the shady trail and pulled my hood close around my face against the bugs as I felt that glorified sense of satisfaction at being in the homestretch dissipate. The sun peaked out now from behind the cloud cover heating up the day, and I wondered where I had gone wrong, disbelieving that we were actually lost. Of course, we couldn’t get thoroughly lost on this mountain, there were trails all over the place that went somewhere and worst case we would just follow one and stumble into someone’s back field and then figure out where we were. But that wasn’t much of an option for me, trying to wrestle my dogs in a civilized setting.

So, I turned and called to the dogs as I tried to muster some enthusiasm for climbing the mountain again. I glanced over my shoulder at them as they stood in the middle of the trail, peering over the grasses at me as though I were crazy. Hadn’t we already climbed this hill? But when they saw I wasn’t kidding, they followed and the three of us trudged back up the trail together and I tried to forget about how hungry I was.

We walked and walked, making one more wrong turn, until I found the last spot I recognized and then I stood in the middle of the forked trail and turned slowly until all the elements of the landscape started to fall into place one by one. I pieced together a view I remembered, ‘that little tree there and that stand of poplars. This is the way we came’. Then I recalled the short side jog we did from one trail to another and we were on our way again.

We all sort of shambled down the mountain, passed the tree across the trail, the pile of old logs, and our footprints in the mud pointing up the hill. It was a while before I could hear the road ahead, the odd car rushing past. I leashed the dogs before the road came into view, not wanting them to tumble on to it in front of a truck

The flowers in the meadow glowed brilliantly beneath the full face of the sun and in some ways it felt as though we had just been here moments before and in others as though we had been gone for days. We crossed the road, again without incident, and then clambered through the trees and brush back into the cool familiarity of our woods.

Back at the house, the sun now streaming through the windows and spilling on to the deck, I found 17 ticks on the legs of my pants after I had discarded my hiking clothes for something clean and I shuddered to think what I would find on the dogs.

After lunch I ushered them out on to the deck, the two of them tired enough after our three-hour adventure they seemed happy to lie on the warm, sun-drenched boards as I worked my fingers through their fur.

The sun slipped quickly across the sky, soon throwing ragged shadows from the treetops onto the deck. I watched the shadows inch closer and closer to the wall of the house, the patch of sun diminishing, its intensity muted by the shade as I pulled more ticks from fur, and still more. In the end there were so many, I lost count.

Learning curves

 

It was a flat grey day in late winter and the light coming in at the windows seemed pale and listless. Molly lay sprawled out on the kitchen floor across the garishly coloured, fraying quilt that was folded into a square for the purposes of an impromptu bed for the dogs or a place to tunnel for the cats.

Molly had been with us only a few months and while we were all managing to fit together in some sort of new family kind of way, there was a lot about Molly we still didn’t quite get and there was a lot about our life that Molly didn’t understand. For one thing, she seemed a bit perplexed with the profusion of hugs we tossed around.

I’m sure she had been hugged before. She came from a loving home after all. Perhaps she did not feel as though she knew us well enough at that point to truly get into the spirit of things, but whenever she was lying on the floor and one of us knelt down beside her and then wrapped our arms around her neck or tried to stretch out along the length of her back and drape an arm across her shoulder or pet her head or scratch her ear, she would stiffly pull away and then leap to her feet, an expression of incredulousness flashing across her face, before she scurried from the room, throwing an uncomfortable glance over her shoulder.

This day, with the flat light at the windows muffling the life within, I lay down in front of Molly, leaving a good five inches between myself and where the tips of her toes rested at the ends of her stretched out legs. I propped my head on my elbow and stared Molly directly in the nose. I decided not to stare her in the eye in case she took this as some sort of intimidation technique, and I didn’t say a word.

She sighed deeply and I told her she was a good girl and then I noticed the little pink spot just to the right of and a little bit below her nose, kind of like a beauty mark that had not been there the last time I looked.

“What’s that?” I asked as I reached out to touch it. Molly lifted her head up with a snap and lay in the awkwardly crouched way she lays when she seems uncomfortable about something or unsure of what she will do next. And then she leapt up and walked away.

“It’s probably an ingrown hair,” Morgan said later when we sat at the table and Molly stood between us, surreptitiously perusing any interesting smells that may have wafted from the tabletop.

That seemed reasonable I thought until later when I watched Chestnut, a cat who the last I had seen would rather fight Murdoch for a piece of cheese than be within earshot of Molly, sit quietly beneath the table and lash out with his paw at Molly as she walked past. He smacked her in the tail and she kind of two-stepped and pulled her tail closer to her body as she circled the table. When she was about a quarter of the way around, Chestnut swiped at her again, charging towards her with purpose. Molly leapt forward in a crouch and made a beeline from the room with Chestnut stomping out from under the table to see her off.

It was then I became pretty certain the pink spot beneath Molly’s nose was most likely where a well-aimed claw had landed when Chestnut finally stood up for himself. That, I thought, I would have loved to have seen.

At first I was quite pleased as I watched the balance of power shift between these two. Chestnut was no longer slinking around from room to room, scared to live in his own house, running in a panic for cover whenever he caught a glimpse of Molly, who had been spurred on by his dashing form to lunge and try and grab him in her jaws. But it wasn’t long before we realized Chestnut was taking things a bit too far. He wasn’t just standing up for himself and making sure Molly respected his space and his position as cat in the house he was becoming a tyrant.

It was Molly now who would enter a room, then turn on a dime and rush out again when she saw Chestnut was already in that room. And he would sit up a little taller, smile a little more slyly, twitch his tail with confidence.

Soon we were imploring Molly to stand up for herself. “Don’t let him push you around Molly,” we would say. “He’s just being a bully, and you’re a dog!”

But the more nervous she became, the more power that gave the cat. She would refuse to walk past him on the stairs, turning and turning in a dither about what to do. Chestnut sat in doorways and just stared, while she paced back and forth and tried to work up the courage to run past him. For a while she walked around with a bit of a panicked look in her eye as though expecting Chestnut to jump out at any moment.

As is usually the case, food became the great equalizer. Specifically cheese. It didn’t matter where Chestnut or Molly or Murdoch were in the house or what they were doing, the minute the crinkle of the cheese wrapper was heard, everyone came running and congregated around the legs of whoever was manning the block of cheese. It is what ultimately allowed Chestnut to be in the same room as Murdoch a few years ago and now, more recently, what has allowed Chestnut and Molly to stand side-by-side, neither one chasing the other or being chased, and join forces for the greater good.

Slowly, they seem to have worked out some sort of agreement. There are days still when Molly is leary of walking past the cat and days when he swats her triumphantly, making her jog from the room. But there are also days when Chestnut swats the wrong dog with the wrong attitude and Murdoch spins around with a snarl on his lips and Chestnut is taken down a peg or two. Mostly, though, a sort of peace has been restored, a peace that can be fleeting in a home that includes two dogs, two cats and two humans.

Games in the woods

In the woods there are pockets of warm air hovering in the shadows not too far from where bright beams of sunlight penetrate the leafy canopy. We walk into them unexpectedly and it is like swimming into warm pools of water suspended in a cold lake.

The day is hot. In summer we walk before the sun reaches its apex for the day and try to avoid the hours on either side of it when the sun blares down with all its power and the air is still but for gentle currents stirring the tree tops lethargically.

The heat is a surprise as we walk out the door. It holds a heaviness at its edges that speaks of hotter days to come, but even now in the shade of the woods the air is thickened by the sun, the saturated air from beyond the woods seeping in from the edges to mix with the shade, and when a cooler breeze blows as though created somewhere in the middle of the forest in the darkest places between the trees, we stop our bounding run through the woods and let it find us, swirl around us like a current in a river around rocks in its path.

It is the seventh day of summer and already we have started a fire in our woodstove three times. But it rained off and on over the course of a week, torrentially. The sky was obliterated by it; there was thunder and dampness and cold nights. We are told, in spots, there is still frost in the ground. So, we had fires in the afternoons to chase away the damp that penetrates everything, makes your very spirit cold. The dogs, of course, thought we were nuts.

Today, though, it is hot and we are running through the woods. I am chasing Murdoch because I do not trust him. We left the house and headed up the trail in our woods together, he and Molly and I, but part way up I could see his distraction taking hold. His nose pointed skyward with purpose, his eyes partially closed, concentrating on the smells carried on the wind and he marched onward with more determination.

The undergrowth has grown thick and full with all the rain and the dogs can turn a corner and disappear in the blink of an eye. It has happened more often recently with Murdoch taking off for stretches of time leaving me to call his name into the green wall of the leading edge of the new growth forest behind our woods, and Molly to jab me in the leg repeatedly with a stick. A couple of times, Molly has disappeared with him.

So, today as I watch Murdoch’s demeanour change, I quicken my pace to keep him within view, until we are all running through the woods and I hope the dogs think it is a game, fun enough to distract them from anything else, like whatever it is Murdoch smells in the great expanse of the woods or the intriguing noises of heavy machinery and grumbling compressors and banging and clanging coming from the direction of our neighbours’ place where a new home is being built.

The dogs leap over downed trees and I leap over the expanses in between, my momentum carrying me from log to log and it is a game for me too as the tread of my shoe grips the bark of one tree and then the next and the next and I wonder how far I can go before my feet miss and I crash to the ground.

But I stop before that happens, to enjoy the cool breeze pushing through the trees. And then we head for the farthest corner of the woods, away from the noises of building and the smells of whatever it is that always leads Murdoch astray, and we find sticks and the dogs run after them until they are tired enough to walk back with me through the woods.

We walk through dappled sunlight and those unexpected pockets of warm air amidst shady coolness and we head to Bear’s puddle, full with rainwater and grown around with the bright green leaves of forest plants. The dogs stop for a drink before following our trail back to the house where they spread out on the floor to cool down and I watch the clouds close in overhead, blue sky pinched out by flat greyness, sunlight diffused into uniformity and a light rain begins to fall, shushing through the trees, filling the air with a smell that is electric and sweet as though sparks from the sun have been doused with sugar water.

There is cool air coming in at the windows again and the day has completely changed and I think I can exchange my glass of water for a warm cup of tea.

Later, when the sun comes out again, the dogs stare at me meaningfully, clearly having decided they have never been more bored in all their lives.